SEXUAL ABUSE

09.17.12

Inside the Mind of a Pedophile

Mark Wilson

Jerry Sandusky in many ways went about his sex abuse in a textbook manner, and that’s partly why he managed to hide it for so long. The former Penn State football coach managed to get away with sexually abusing young boys for years, shrouded both by the pigskin loyalties of Happy Valley and a veil of social respectability. In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explores the ways in which child molesters build their lives and those of the people around them to accommodate their behavior. “Horsing around in the shower?” Gladwell writes. “It did not occur to them that the goofy, horseplaying Sandusky they thought they knew was another of Sandusky’s deceptions.”